1. Field of Invention
The field of the present invention relates in general to wireless local area networks including wireless access points (WAP) and wireless stations and methods for diagnosing same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Home and office networks, a.k.a. wireless local area networks (WLAN) are established serviced using a device called a Wireless Access Point (WAP). The WAP may include a router. The WAP wirelessly couples all the devices of the home network, e.g. wireless stations such as: computers, printers, televisions, digital video (DVD) players, security cameras and smoke detectors to one another and to the Cable or Subscriber Line through which Internet, video, and television is delivered to the home. Most WAPs implement the IEEE 802.11 standard which is a contention based standard for handling communications among multiple competing devices for a shared wireless communication medium on a selected one of a plurality of communication channels. The frequency range of each communication channel is specified in the corresponding one of the IEEE 802.11 protocols being implemented, e.g. “a”, “b”, “g”, “n”, “ac”, “ad”. Communications follow a hub and spoke model with a WAP at the hub and the spokes corresponding to the wireless links to each ‘client’ device.
After selection of a single communication channel for the associated home network, access to the shared communication channel relies on a multiple access methodology identified as Collision Sense Multiple Access (CSMA). CSMA is a distributed random access methodology first introduced for home wired networks such as Ethernet for sharing a single communication medium, by having a contending communication link back off and retry access to the line if a collision is detected, i.e. if the wireless medium is in use.
Communications on the single communication medium are identified as “simplex” meaning, one communication stream from a single source node to one or more target nodes at one time, with all remaining nodes capable of “listening” to the subject transmission. To confirm arrival of each communication packet, the target node is required to send back an acknowledgment, a.k.a. “ACK” packet to the source. Absent the receipt of the ACK packet the source will retransmit the unacknowledged data until an acknowledgement is received, or a time-out is reached.
Initially wireless home networks had limited indoor range and throughput of 20 feet and 1 Mbps respectively. As such they were limited to delivery of data, where inconsistencies in delivery, e.g. temporary outages or throughput shortfalls, are not noticeable. With improvements in range and throughput of 250 feet and 600 Mbps came the possibility of wireless delivery to low latency audio-video streams for consumer devices such as TVs. Each TV requires 5-30 Mbps in uninterrupted throughput for acceptable picture quality. Picture quality is extremely sensitive to placement of the wireless components, i.e. WAP, set top box and/or TV. Wireless content delivery to all rooms in a large house is not always possible. Also, once an installation has been made successfully, picture quality can degrade due to neighboring wireless networks in other apartments or condominiums or other forms of interference. Typically a Telco or other content provider will be compelled to send out a technician for pre or post installation diagnostic of a wireless local area network.
What is needed is an improved method of installing and operating a WLAN.